Fawcett's Important Theoretical Question

Fawcett (2010: 258):

The following important theoretical question now arises: 

"Should the analysis of (a) in Figure 20 show the potential of every quantifying expression that uses a cardinal number to be a nominal group? (Indeed, it can be two or more co-ordinated nominal groups, as in five thousand, two hundred and fifty books.) And should it additionally show the ability of the 'amount' to be 'adjusted', as in (c), and so for the two structures to be combined, as in over two hundred books? 

If we were to apply Halliday's principle of 'total accountability', we would have to show every occurrence of a simple cardinal number, as in sixty books, as embedded two layers further down the tree, i.e., as an element of a nominal group in a quantity group in a nominal group. 

And if this principle were extended to apply at every other point in the grammar where such issues arise (some of which we shall meet shortly), the work involved in both generating and analysing a text would be enormously increased.

Blogger Comments:

Reminder:

[1] To be clear, on the one hand, to be logically coherent, an analysis of sixty books — (a) in Figure 20 — should be an analysis of sixty books, and not some other nominal group that happens to feature a cardinal numeral.

On the other hand, from the perspective of SFL Theory, none of Fawcett's examples involves a quantifying expression (Numerative) realised by a nominal group. Instead, all are realised by word complexes:

[2] To be clear, this is misleading, because it is absolute nonsense — and not merely because tree structures and quantity groups do not feature in SFL Theory. What Fawcett terms 'accountability at all ranks' is the general principle of exhaustiveness, which simply means that 'everything in the wording has some function at every rank' (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 84). The analyses provided above (in [1]) demonstrate precisely how SFL Theory accounts for the functions of all words at group rank for Fawcett's examples.

 [3] To be clear, these issues only arise for Fawcett's model, as demonstrated above, and in future posts.